About Vivek Ramaswamy

I don’t go into politics so much these days, mostly because it makes me sad and angry. But I was interested by what Vivek Ramaswamy, soon to get a plum job in the Trump administration, had to say about American culture, and the response to it: 

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers. A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers. (Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates). More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”

And there’s much in there I might agree with. On the other hand, this is also the culture that venerates a semi-literate charlatan like Trump, so without all that intellectual mediocrity, Ramaswamy wouldn’t have his new job.

About Stoppard

I wrote a while back about someone who gave a disobliging review to a play because it was stuffed with obscure references; not that he, the reviewer, found them obscure, but he assumed that younger theatre-goers would be baffled by TS Eliot and the Marx brothers.

And now Fiona Mountford goes one better, delivering a kicking to a revival of Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love because it’s “three hours of often indistinguishable men exchanging achingly arch lines about the minutiae of classical grammar and quoting screeds and screeds of Latin at each other”. And of course Ms Mountford gets the minutiae, the screeds, even, because she read classics at Oxford; but she thinks the other punters probably wouldn’t. The fact that the play’s author is a refugee speaker of English as a second language who never went to university at all doesn’t seem to figure in her calculations. “Far too often,” she sighs, “it feels less like drama and more like intellectual masturbation and that, surely, is not why we go to the theatre.” Quite right too. It’s why we write theatre reviews though, or should be.

PS: To be fair, Stoppard himself has worried about leaving the audience behind.

About Twitter

Crikey. I just came across something I posted 18 years ago, when I’d just joined Twitter, which was so new I had to explain what it was. I called it 

one of those sites that balances precariously on that narrow rail between “Zeitgeist-defining” and “stupid”. The deal is that users simply key what they are doing righthererightnow into a box, and then see what everyone else is doing at the same time.

and then compared it to an episode of Torchwood. Ah, such happy, innocent days.

About Father Christmas

Several points arising from the tale of Rev Dr Paul Chamberlain, who apparently brought a group of schoolchildren to tears when he told them that Santa’s not real and their parents eat the biscuits supposedly left for him. The first and most obvious is how easy it is for devotees of one myth to brusquely dismiss another. How would the reverend gentleman react if someone else told the children that Santa is real, but Jesus is just a fairy story to make people behave themselves?

Also, when I saw the headlines, I assumed the traumatised kids were five at most. In fact, they were all in Year 6, which makes them 10 or 11 years old. And they’re still shocked by the revelation that Santa is a fraud? Isn’t that a bit weird?

About footnotes

I ruddy love footnotes, I do, and have been told off by more than one editor for using too many of them. Apparently their presence disturbs readers, presumably because it reminds them that for every book they do read, there are several hundred more waiting round the corner to ambush them. Which to me would be a lovely feeling, but what do I know?

That said, I do share the frustration of absolutely knowing something’s true and yet not being able to find a reference to validate it. Which is why I love this passage:

I have in my head an assertion that a friend once told me was written by Whitney Balliett, the jazz critic and exemplary listener-describer. The assertion was that there were only two absolute virtuoso figures in jazz: Sarah Vaughan and Art Tatum. When did Balliett write it? I can’t say. Neither can I be sure that he did write it. Once you get inside a writer’s voice, you can imagine things he didn’t actually write. Once I troubled Whitney, in his old age, about a phrase of his I swore I had read — something about Lester Young playing “wheaty” notes. He said it sounded possible, and went to look it up. He searched for a couple days and came up-handed. I might have dreamed it.

Ben Ratliff, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen to Music Now (London: Allen Lane, 2016), p. 81.

About YMCA

The sanctity or otherwise of an author’s intentions always offers something to chew over. I do sympathise with Beckett’s exasperation over the critical tendency to see theology at work in his most popular play: “If I had meant it to be about God,” he’s said to have snapped, “I’d have called it Waiting for God.” But at the same time I lean towards Barthes’ assertion that the Author (himself included) is dead the moment he types the final full-stop, and it’s down to the mere civilians who are his readers to write and rewrite and bestow meaning. If I think it’s about God then, in my head at least, it is about God, whatever Beckett thinks.

How then do we respond to Victor Willis’s announcement that the song ‘YMCA’, for which he provided the lyrics, is not gay at all, oh no, it certainly isn’t, despite the fact that it was all I could do to stop myself from referring not to “the song ‘YMCA’” but to “the gay anthem ‘YMCA’” mainly because for decades it’s been a gay anthem, for gays, about gay stuff? But Mr Willis, who, and I ought to make this very clear indeed, IS NOT IN THE SLIGHTEST BIT GAY IN ANY SENSE OF THE WORD, has announced that in fact the song isn’t gay either, and the bit about hanging out with all the boys is about black straight male bonding and not gays doing gay things, at the YMCA or anywhere else. And in fact, from next month, if anyone says that ‘YMCA’ is even the slightest bit gay, Willis’s wife, who is a female lady, with proper lady bosoms and stuff, because Victor’s NOT GAY, will sue them with all the heterolegal fury she can bring to bear and with the blessing of her exceedingly not-gay husband.

But he’s OK with Donald Trump (also not gay – have you seen him dance?) using the song at his own not-gay rallies and ensuring lots of similarly straight dollars entering Willis’s lady-snogging bank account. Because neither of them is gay, nor is the song, nor are any of the Village People, including the one with the big moustache, nor is or was anything ever gay. Got that? NOT. GAY.

PS: The Streisand effect.

PPS: Hamlet, Act III, scene ii, line 221.

PPPS: Some other songs that have been misinterpreted, albeit not by their authors.

About The Holiday

(Slowly realising that if I do ever write my book about What We Do And Don’t Need To Know And Why, it’ll be for the most part anecdotal and solipsistic, something akin to Perec’s Je me souviens, and what’s wrong with that?)

Jude Law was being interviewed on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House yesterday, plugging his latest, rather grim-sounding movie, which is clearly yet another attempt to break away from his pretty-boy image. Unfortunately, Paddy O’Connell chose that moment to bring up the seasonal romcom The Holiday, which he loves and, according to the bantery exchange they had to plug the lunchtime news, so does his BBC colleague Johnny Dymond.

Which gave me a slightly odd feeling as I sipped my Sunday morning coffee, as I realised I’d never even heard of the movie, let alone seen it. And as Paddy and Jonny oohed and aahed about the doubtless hilarious and/or heartwarming goings-on, and Jude just sounded embarrassed, I wondered whether the whole thing was some sort of arch postmodern joke, “quick, let’s invent a movie and make Tim wonder how he missed it” but no, I Googled it, it’s real, it’s packed with people I recognise, whose work I’ve enjoyed elsewhere but... no. Nothing. No bells rung. Except that the casual way they discussed it, with no scaffolding, no context, implied that I really should know and that I’m somehow culturally deficient by not knowing, like someone who appears on a quiz show and gets castigated on social media for not having heard of Hamlet or Buenos Aires or nitrogen or artichokes.

Normal service was resumed later in the day, during an amiable TV show involving the unlikely duo of Bill Bailey and Shaun Ryder ambling through the Somerset countryside, when a pub landlord mentioned that Henry VIII was rumoured to have stayed at his establishment, “during the disillusionment of the monasteries” and I laughed and then wondered how many other people I know might get the (inadvertent?) joke. Indeed, how many people reading this? 

PS: In news that may or may not be relevant, the Oxford word of the year is “brain rot”.